Mihail Karavokiros: An Italian Passport for HopeWhen Max Dolgizer, a 54-year-old New York manager and art collector, was recently told that a number of his relatives were saved from the Shoah in Riga by a bold Greek man and an Italian passport, he was puzzled...
This is the story of how a man saved almost a dozen Jews during the Nazi occupation of the Latvian city of Riga, where 35,000 Jews lived in 1935, but only 150 remained when the Red Army ousted the Nazis in 1944.
When the German army entered Riga in 1941, Karavokiros was enthusiastic. He went out in the street with his daughter Maria, 8, and her younger brother Socrate, to show them the people who finally liberated Latvia.
“German soldiers were tall and handsome,” remembered Mrs. Maria Lorenzetti, an elegant Italian woman in her late seventies. “Their helmets were shining.”
At the time, Karavokiros smiled. “You’ll see, Germany will bring back the law,” he said to his children.
Born on the Greek island of Kalimnos, Karavokiros became an Italian citizen in 1912, after the Italo-Turkish war. Then, after working as a commercial traveler in Scandinavia and in the Czarist Empire, he settled in Latvia and opened a factory producing halva, a traditional confection made from sesame paste.
Married to a Jewish woman, Fanny Dolgizer(Dolgizer is maiden name of my grandmother-died in Riga's Ghetto) , and father of two, Karavokiros was harshly affected by the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940. The Russians closed his factory and suspended his bank account. Karavokiros would have been arrested and sent to Siberia, but his workers intervened and described him as a good boss.
Despite his hatred of Communism, less than twelve hours after the Germans entered Riga, Karavokiros’ excitement faded away completely.
That very night, SS officials arrested, tortured and executed more than 2,000 Jews in Riga’s central prison. For the most part, they were prominent townspeople: politicians, businessmen and entrepreneurs. Among them was Zalman Shefer, the Jewish husband of Karavokiros’ sister-in-law. His daughter, Riva Shefer, a Shoah survivor who is now 88 years old and still lives in Riga, remembers that night perfectly.
“When they knocked on our door, my father was wearing his pajamas. He put on his coat and went out with them,” Mrs. Shefer said. “I never saw him again.”
The following day, the Karavokiros family was at home with some Jewish relatives and friends. All of a sudden they heard a terrible noise coming from the stairs. Young Latvian collaborators hired by the German commando were rounding up Jews.
“When they violently knocked on our door, my father confronted them holding a small Italian flag that he used to keep on his desk,” said Mrs. Lorenzetti. “He told them that our house was Italian territory and Italy was an ally of Germany, so nobody could get in our place with aggressive intentions. Perhaps struck by such a firm resolve, they left.”
In the following weeks the prohibitions for the Jews increased. They were forced to wear the Star of David and banned from sidewalks, public transportation and stores.
The Germans officially announced the opening of Riga’s ghetto on Aug. 23, 1941. “The Jews who were put in the ghetto included 5,652 children, 8,300 disabled people, 9,507 women and 6,143 men,” said Professor Margers Vestermanis, historian and director of Riga’s Jews in Latvia museum
Karavokiros had to suspend the production of halva and produce jam for the Wehmacht, but he could keep on working, both because he was regarded as “Aryan” and because his Italian citizenship protected him.
The first akzion, the Nazi term for mass killings, took place three months after the ghetto was opened, on Nov. 27, 1941. The German soldiers told the Jews they were going to be moved further east.
“That travel was short,” said Professor Vestermanis. “The Nazis walked 15,000 Jews to the Rumbula Forest, just outside Riga, and shot them all.”
Karavokiros got a tip about the akzion and succeeded in entering the ghetto in a Wehmacht official’s car with his brother-in-law Harry Barinbaum. Barinbaum collected two big containers. Gidon Barinbaum, his son, was hidden in the first one. Benita Barinbaum, his five-year-old nephew, was in the second. Both were asleep. They were given sleeping pills to minimize the risks of the rescue operation.
“When my father came home with these two kids, he was distraught,” Mrs. Lorenzetti said. “He went straight to his bedroom.”
Maria entered the room to greet her father and found him on his knees with his head in his hands under the Greek icons. Karavokiros gave her a hug and confessed to her he wanted to save those who were persecuted.
“My father said that if he didn’t do something for them,” remembered Mrs. Lorenzetti, “he would have felt partly responsible for that crime and we children would have hated him.”
So Karavokiros organized a network of places where Jews could hide. He asked for help from some of the Latvian, Finnish and Polish workers of his factory, as well as Riga’s Greek community and other people he trusted: Mrs. Basilova Lemesheva, a porter; Mr. Karcevski, a butler; and Mrs. Emilia Gaevskala, a housekeeper.
Karavokiros hid Jews in a secret part of the changing room of his factory. The workers knew about the hiding place, but never talked about it. He also hid them behind the tent that covered the bed of a porter’s lodge, in big empty houses and, of course, in his own apartment.
The Greek-Italian entrepreneur moved around Riga with great care, but frantically. He sent loyal people to shop for the hidden Jews in different grocery stores so the quantity of the food bought would not raise suspicions.
Soon, however, the Gestapo targeted Karavokiros. After a number of raids, when he was lucky enough to be tipped off by friends in time to move the Jews to safer places, he ended up in the ghetto with his family. He was released through the Greek community’s diplomatic efforts. At the urging of the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Dino Alfieri, Karavokiros decided to leave Latvia for Italy in the summer of 1943.
The Karavokiros family settled in Trieste. At that point they were safe. Nobody knew that Fanny Dolgizer was Jewish. Her last name sounded German and was familiar in Trieste, a port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918. In the meantime, though, the Jews in Latvia were not safe. Karavokiros’ network of hiding places was one of the very few options for their survival.
Before leaving, Karavokiros made sure the system could continue to work without him. He talked to his helpers and tipped them well. And in fact, it did hold.
Riva Shefer was one of the people who benefited from it. She stayed hidden in Riga in 14 different houses from July 1943 to Oct. 13, 1944, when the Red Army entered Riga.
That day, Mrs. Shefer was in an auditorium-sized room in an empty house. A little light filtered between heavy purple curtains. As she sometimes did, she peeped through the curtains to catch a glimpse of the street.
“I saw Soviet tanks,” said Mrs. Shefer with a smile. “I was wondering whether all that really happened. Whether the Russians really kicked out the Germans.”
Fifty years after that cold October day, in March 1995, Mrs. Lorenzetti, Mr. Karavokiros’s daughter, who had moved from Trieste to Milan, received a letter from the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem. Mr. Karavokiros had received the title of Righteous Among the Nations, thanks to the report of Mrs. Riva Shefer.
Karavokiros, who died in 1972 in Trieste with few regrets, never mentioned what he accomplished in Latvia.
“My father was a very reserved person,” said Mrs. Lorenzetti. “I just thought he did what he had to. He had no need to talk about it, to show off or anything.”

Friday, February 26, 2010

In the rolling Piedmont hills of North Carolina, potters were turning out fine work before the American Revolution. But by the 20th century, the tradition had faltered. Two passionate women, a half-century apart, saved it.
Nancy Sweezy, who died at the age of 88 in Cambridge, Mass., on Feb. 6, was the second.
Riding a surge of interest in folk arts in the 1960s and 1970s, Ms. Sweezy revived Jugtown, the famous pottery that the first of the two women, Juliana Royster Busbee, started in 1917.
Ms. Sweezy begged and borrowed $22,500 to buy the financially staggering Jugtown in 1968. She came up with new glazes to replace ones that used lead, and gave them names like Blueridge Blue and Dogwood White.(read more...)
Thanks to Tessa.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Yet another entry in the Jason Friedberg-Aaron Seltzer series of movie spoofs, this scattershot collection lame gags is the definition of disposable entertainment: Lazy, superficially au courant and utterly forgettable.
Commitment-phobe Will (Matt Lanter) breaks up with his girlfriend Amy (Vanessa Minnillo) on the day of his Super Duper Sweet 16 party – yes, he's 25 and a guy, but better late than never and hey, why should girls have all the fun? – and is haunted by the thought that he's just made the biggest mistake of his life. Amy comes to the party with her new beau, a Calvin Klein underwear model, but leaves in a snit just before meteors begin raining down on the Earth. Will, his best friend Calvin (Gary Johnson), Calvin's girlfriend Lisa (Kim Kardashian) and the hugely pregnant and relentlessly hip 'n' snarky Juney (Crista Flanagan) try to escape the city, but Will turns back to rescue Amy, now trapped at the Museum of Natural History and holding the key that could save the world.
Like MEET THE SPARTANS (2008), EPIC MOVIE (2007), DATE MOVIE (2006) and the SCARY MOVIE franchise, DISASTER MOVIE isn't parody a la AIRPLANE! (1980) and HOTSHOTS! (1991): Rather than poking knowing and affectionate fun at genre conventions, it simply strings together a series of witless, juvenile gags predicated on throwaway fads, catchphrases and celebrity scandals. American Gladiators, Dr. Phil, Hannah Montana, Amy Winehouse, the HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL movies and MTV's My Super Sweet 16 jostle for screen time with WANTED, INDIANA JONES AND THE CRYSTAL SKULL, HANCOCK, CLOVERFIELD, THE RUINS, BEOWULF, Christopher Nolan's BATMAN movies, JUNO, SUPERBAD, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, 10,000 B.C., the SEX AND THE CITY movie, ENCHANTED, ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS and IRON MAN. The allusions are so cheap and lazy that characters are called upon to make sure everyone gets it by declaring "Look everyone, it's Jessica Simpson," "Oh my God, Hannah Montana's dead" and, most memorably, "It's a TWISTER," which sets up a series of sight gags involving miscellaneous superheroes and a falling cow. The only bright spots are Christopher Lennertz's pitch-perfect musical pastiches: His lampoons of the HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL series' blandly competent pop tunes, Alvin and the Chipmunks-style novelty numbers (Lennertz scored the abominable 2007 Chipmunks reboot) and, most notably, the viral-video phenomenon "I'm F—king Matt Damon" are everything the rest of the film isn't: Witty, clever and steeped in an insider's knowledge of entertainment-industry clichés ripe for surgical skewering. He deserves a better forum for his considerable gifts.
(from HERE)
I think i"ll enjoy it...

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

R. Gordon Wasson launched the “psychedelic revolution” with his Life magazine article of 13 May 1957, in which he publicized his experience on the nights of 29-30 June, 1955, in the remote Oaxacan village of Huautla de Jiménez with the Mazatec curandera or shaman María Sabina, whose identity he tried to protect under the pseudonym of Eva Mendez, even being the first to use the embarrassing term of “magic mushroom,” which was probably invented by the magazine’s editor. As a professional international banker, he was a most unlikely candidate for this role. He and his wife Valentina Pavlovna were about to publish in that same year their Mushrooms, Russia, and History, which they had started writing in the mid 1940s as a cookbook, with merely a footnote on “the gentle art of mushroom-knowing as practiced by the northern Slavs.” The Life article effectively was publicity for the book, which was lavishly published at Wasson’s expense in a limited edition of only 512 copies, which would have placed it beyond the notice of the general public: the original price of $175 has now escalated to several thousand, something that Wasson was proud of as an investment.(read more...)

mushr
During their Mazatec séances the Wassons had experienced the divinatory potential of the Mexican mushrooms. The account of their first velada with Aurelio Carreras, María Sabina’s son-in-law, on 15 August 1953, two years before they ate the mushrooms themselves, was intentionally buried in the bulk of Russia, Mushrooms, and History. Wasson described the event more fully in his last book, Persephone’s Quest. “I had always had a horror,” he wrote, “of those who preached a kind of pseudo-religion of telepathy, who for me were unreliable people; if our discoveries were to be drawn to their attention, we were in danger of being adopted by such undesirables.” Carreras, without prompting or questions, was able to tell the Wassons correctly that their son Peter was not in Boston, as they thought, but in New York, that he was about to enlist in the army, and that a close member of the family would die within the year.In February of 1955, Wasson mentioned this occurrence to Andrija Puharich, when they met for cocktails in the apartment of the New York socialite Alice Bouverie, who had learned of the Wassons’ ongoing research from a reference librarian at the Public Library, while investigating psychoactive mushrooms. Puharich, an American-born medical doctor and parapsychologist of Croatian descent, at the time was a captain with the United States Army, stationed at the Fort Detrick Chemical and Biological Warfare Center in Edgewood Maryland, working for the CIA on chemical and other means of mind control; and with Wasson’s permission, he dutifully passed on the information about Carreras to his military associates, which may have been why Wasson’s 1956 expedition to Mexico was infiltrated by a CIA mole, James Moore, with a generous financial grant, clearly indicating that the intelligence community regarded a divinatory mushroom as a valuable tool in their arsenal. Moore found the journey extremely unpleasant, and although he witnessed the séance, he was extremely ill, and eight kilos thinner, he fled with a packet of the mushrooms, intending to isolate and synthesize the chemical, which, in fact, Albert Hofmann succeeded in doing before him. Hiem identified them as Psilocybe caerulescens and the psychoactive agent was named psilocybin.
(read more...)

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

David Shrigley occupies a strange place within British art, being at once admired by critics for his loose drawing style and admonished for his sloppy penmanship; applauded for his sense of humour and yet being dismissed by some because of it. With his work as likely to adorn a T-shirt or greetings card as it is to appear in a gallery, Shrigley is very much a populist; his cartoon-style drawings are on show in books, the pages of the Guardian and in advertising. Something of an artistic fidget, he makes sculpture and films, and has designed record sleeves and recorded a spoken word CD.
But think of the British art establishment and Shrigley’s is not a name on the tip of your tongue. On the level of pure popularity and ease of recognition of his work, he should be up there with the Chapmans or Tracey Emin, yet the tall, softly spoken 38-year-old seems as far as ever from a Turner Prize nomination.(read more...)

Riding with Alan Gibbs in his Jeep, we went down to the edge of the harbour to look at the Goldsworthy. We had to drive out along a shell bank with the water lapping at both sides. The end was blanketed by a vast flock of roosting oystercatchers waiting out the high tide. Shells crunched under the tires and the wind tugged at our jackets as Alan inched the vehicle towards the birds. In wave after wave they quietly, unhurried, lifted into the air, borne on the shore breeze with only the slightest movement of their wings. Hovering, they drifted out a little into the wind and back over our heads to settle again behind us. We stopped. The teeming birds formed a silent arc over our heads that echoed Goldsworthy’s stone arches marching through the shallows next to us. I caught a glimpse in this moment of how one could be tied to such a place. It is the sort of place that makes one pause; take time; take time out. Though it is the antithesis of many other things in life, it also has the power to tether one to life.

Seeing him here, traversing the rolling landscape of his 1000 acre New Zealand property, talking about one sculpture after another, is to feel Gibbs’ excitement for the place and the art. He is as enthusiastic as a boy in a toy store; and with good reason. When he bought the land now laconically known as The Farm, in 1991, he already had three decades of significant art collecting behind him. Commissioning art works was in the back of his mind “but not the major purpose” of searching for a rural retreat. Looking back, it is clear now that 1991 marked the beginning of a whole new art collecting adventure for Gibbs. He is a rare breed for several reasons. He has made a total commitment to open-brief commissioning of major site specific works from key artists. He is forming a collection of permanent private commissions of the scale that nowadays are more often temporary and the province of public institutions. And he has adopted an expanded role as collector. By rolling up his sleeves alongside the artists, he too faces the boundary-pushing challenges that come with an open brief: to play, puzzle and solve. Gibbs has become the artists’ accomplice and is often, as a consequence, the art producer.

Alan Gibbs and his then wife Jenny started collecting in the 1960s. By the early90s when they parted company, they had amassed probably the best collection of works by key New Zealand artists including Gordon Walters, Colin McCahon, Milan Mrkusich, Stephen Banbury and Max Gimblett. After starting with an interest in abstract expressionism, Gibbs admits to “a fairly developed taste for abstract minimalist art.” This has informed the selection of artists for his rural New Zealand project just an hour’s drive north of Auckland.

he land has first place in Gibbs’ heart. It is a place where he can relax and play. The art collecting comes second to his project of re-shaping the landscape through an ongoing programme of softening gullies, re-contouring ridges, restoring wetlands by building lakes, and devising the best tree-planting approaches. Further, The Farm is his home for only three months of every year, for he is very involved in his London-based business. Gibbs is one of New Zealand’s most successful entrepreneurs. He has achievements in engineering, manufacturing, diplomacy, merchant banking and telecommunications; and is now active as founding chairman of Gibbs Technologies, the world leader in the development of High Speed Amphibian technology.

Richard Serra’s Te Tuhirangi Contour oscillates between two characters too, no matter how often I see it. Viewed from any of the ground above it, the 257 metre steel wall has a delicate quality like a dark ribbon curling, almost floating across the evergreen pastures. The deception is beguiling until one walks nearby and underneath the 6 metre high sculpture. Here one is confounded by an altogether different experience. From the downhill side Te Tuhirangi Contour has all the mass of a giant dam filled with water. Each of the 56 steel plates leans out by 11 degrees from the vertical, so the materiality of mass and form impose themselves dramatically as something more felt than seen. Serra said that he wanted to create a work that in some way “collects the volume of the land;” and he has. (read more...)

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Rubbing the rim of a wine glass with a wet finger will cause it to resonate at its resonant frequency. The glass is placed in front of a speaker playing a sine wave, created by the function generator, of this same frequency. When the amplitude is turned up, we can see by shining a strobe light at the glass that this resonant frequency causes it to oscillate. When the glass becomes too stressed, it will shatter, which we see very clearly on high speed video.
A few things to note: The scrolling effect seen in the strobe light footage is caused by interference between the strobe light frequency and the video camera frame rate. Also, the real oscillations of the glass are much faster than they appear in the strobe footage. Setting the frequency of the strobe light can make them appear much slower so that we can see the oscillations in real time without the help of high speed video.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

In DaDA, everybody walks around carrying books on their heads. The more books stacked on your cranium, the smarter you are perceived to be. The story takes off when a little boy is born with a perfectly round head. To the horror of his parents no books will stay put, no matter what they try. Ultimately, they take their son to a hospital, where a learned scholar saws off the top of the kid's skull to study his brain. The doctor discovers the kid is really a genius. He realizes that it is not the books you carry around that matter, it is how you "process" them and create something new out of them. The final twist of the film, that somehow seems to be especially shocking to American audiences (maybe because they are suckered out of a happy ending), is that the father feeds the brilliant brain to the cat. Because with the top sawed off, he can pile an infinite amount of books on his son's head. He'd rather have a kid that looks intelligent, than an intelligent child.
Piet Kroon was storyboard artist for "The Iron Giant, the acclaimed animated feature based on a story by Ted Hughes. His previous feature film credits include that of storyboard artist on the animated feature Quest for Camelot and animator on the Universal Pictures' release An American Tail II: Fievel Goes West.
Kroon's animated short film, T.R.A.N.S.I.T., was short-listed for the 1997 Academy Awards and was nominated for both a British Academy Award and the Cartoon D'or. T.R.A.N.S.I.T was also named Best Animated Short Film of 1998 by the Los Angeles Times Film Critics Association. Another of his animated short films, Dada, was screened at the 1996 Brussels International Film Festival where it won the Best European Short Film Award.
(read more...)

Friday, February 5, 2010

In post-World War I Zurich, out of the conflict's sobering aftermath, there was born an artistic movement that preached a baffling, radical-yet-whimsical philosophy of creativity. Random and meaningless by definition, calculatedly irrational by design, the movement spread like revolt to America and across Europe, voicing the delightfully bizarre protest of a brave new community of artists and writers.
Filmed with the cooperation of original Dadaists Hans Richter and Richard Hulsenbeck, this unique motion picture collage of art, music and poetry is not only an alphabet of German Dadaism, but is in itself, a true Dadaist experience.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Etta Baker was a master of the blues guitar style that became popular in the southern piedmont after the turn of the century. She was raised in the foothills of Caldwell County where music was central in the lives of her family and friends. Both parents played several instruments, and Etta began picking the guitar at the age of three. "I was so small, I had to lay the guitar on the bed, stand on the floor and play on the neck," she recalled. Her seven brothers and sisters already played some instruments and soon she was making music alongside them at community entertainments and corn shuckings.
Mrs. Baker played the guitar and banjo. She rarely sang, preferring to let the instrument speak for her. Like most traditional artists, she played music for personal satisfaction and for the pleasure of friends and family. However, in 1956, her music was recorded on the influential album Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians. She was also featured on a 1972 recording Music From the Hills of Caldwell County. Her popular CD, One Dime Blues, came out in 1991 to great reviews.
In her last 30 years, Mrs. Baker carried her music far beyond the borders of Caldwell County. She performed at the National Folk Festival at Wolf Trap Park in Virginia, the 1984 World's Fair in Knoxville, the Kent State Folk Festival, and the Augusta Heritage Festival. In 1982 she and her sister Cora Phillips were honored jointly with the North Carolina Folklore Society's Brown-Hudson Award. She received the National Heritage Fellowship Award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1991.
Etta Baker and her husband Lee raised nine children, many of whom carry on the family musical tradition. She also worked for more than 20 years at the Skyland Textile Company before retiring in order to pursue her performing career. Mrs. Baker passed away in October, 2006 at the age of 93, having achieved international recognition for her artistry and for North Carolina's finger-picked blues tradition.
(read more..)